What is the Arizona religious liberty law really about?

National Review explains what the proposed law is designed to do.

Excerpt:

In response to a number of lawsuits in which such providers of wedding-related services as bakers and photographers have been threatened with conscription into participating in same-sex ceremonies to which they object on religious grounds, Arizona’s state legislature has adopted a law under which businesses that decline to provide such services will enjoy protection.

It is perhaps unfortunate that it has come to this, but organized homosexuality, a phenomenon that is more about progressive pieties than gay rights per se, remains on the permanent offensive in the culture wars. Live-and-let-live is a creed that the gay lobby specifically rejects: The owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado was threatened with a year in jail for declining to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. New Mexico photographer Elaine Huguenin was similarly threatened for declining to photograph a same-sex wedding. It is worth noting that neither the baker nor the photographer categorically refuses services to homosexuals; birthday cakes and portrait photography were both on the menu. The business owners specifically objected to participating in a civic/religious ceremony that violated their own consciences.

And the so-called liberals answer: “To hell with your consciences.”

In T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, the nature of totalitarianism is captured in the motto “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” Gay marriage has made the sprint from forbidden to compulsory in record time; the day before yesterday, a homosexual marriage was a legal impossibility — and today it is a crime to sit one out.

Gay Americans, like many members of minority groups, are poorly served by their self-styled leadership. Like feminists and union bosses, the leaders of the nation’s gay organizations suffer from oppression envy, likening their situation to that of black Americans — as though having to find a gay-friendly wedding planner (pro tip: try swinging a dead cat) were the moral equivalent of having spent centuries in slavery and systematic oppression under Jim Crow. Their goal is not toleration or even equal rights but official victim-group status under law and in civil society, allowing them to use the courts and other means of official coercion to impose their own values upon those who hold different values.

Which is to say, what is regrettable here is not Arizona’s law but the machinations that have made it necessary. It seems unlikely that those religious bakers and photographers were chosen at random, or that their antagonists will stop until such diversity of opinion as exists about the subject of gay marriage has been put under legal discipline.

That’s a very short and sweet explanation of the law, and what led up to it.

On the one hand, we have a citizen who is offended at being refused a product or a service. The remedy is for them to go next door and get the product or service from someone else. Is that hard? On the other side of the case are Christians with a Constitutional right to religious liberty. Apparently, it is now OK for people to trample on Constitutional rights if they feel offended and have to go next door for something they want. 

Look at it another way. Whose is forcing their values on whom? If the gay couple has to leave the store and go somewhere else, are they being forced by the state through trials and punishments to accept the traditional definition of marriage? Hell no. But Christians who are dragged in front of courts, forced to pay legal fees for both parties, forced to apologize, force to pay fines, and forced to participate in something they oppose are having someone else’s views forced on them. It used to be that the gay activists talked about tolerance. Where is their tolerance now? Where is their rainbow of diversity now? It’s very important to understand that the people on the gay rights side do not recognize Constitutional rights, and they are not tolerant of other people’s views. And they are willing to use the power of the government to force people to celebrate their sexuality.